The cultural Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West was
without precedent. At the outset of this original and wide-ranging
historical survey, David Caute establishes the nature of the
extraordinary cultural competition set up post-1945 between Moscow,
New York, London, and Paris, with the most intimate frontier war
staged in the city of Berlin. Using sources in four languages, the
author of The Fellow-Travellers and The Great Fear explores the
cultural Cold War as it rapidly penetrated theatre, film, classical
music, popular music, ballet, painting, and sculpture, as well as
propaganda by exhibition. Major figures central to Cold War
conflict in the theatre include Brecht, Miller, Sartre, Camus,
Havel, Ionesco, Stoppard, and Konstantin Simonov. Among leading
film directors involved were Eisenstein, Romm, Chiarueli,
Aleksandrov, Kazan, Tarkovsky, and Wajda. In the field of music,
the Soviet Union in the Zhdanov era vigorously condemned
'modernism', 'formalism', and the avant-garde. A chapter is devoted
to the intriguing case of Dmitri Shostakovich, and the disputed
authenticity of his 'autobiography' Testimony. Meanwhile in the
West the Congress for Cultural Freedom was sponsoring the modernist
composers most vehemently condemned by Soviet music critics,
notably Stravinsky. The Soviet Party was unable to check the appeal
of jazz on the Voice of America, then rock music, to young
Russians. Visits to the West by the Bolshoi and Kirov ballet
companines, the pride of the USSR, were fraught with threats of
cancellation and the danger of defection. Caute dampens overheated
speculations about KGB plots to injure Rudolf Nureyev and other
defecting dancers. Turning to painting, where socialist realism
prevailed in the USSR and dissident art was often brutally
repressed, Caute explores the paradox of Picasso's membership of
the French Communist Party. Re-assessing the extent of covert CIA
patronage of abstract expressionist artists like Jackson Pollock,
Caute finds that the CIA's role has been much exaggerated. Caute
also challenges some recent accounts of 'Cold War culture', which
virtually ignore the Soviet performance and cultural activity
outside the USA. Soviet artistic standards and teaching levels were
exceptionally high, but the regime's endemic fear of free
innovation finally accelerated its collapse.
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